My country has a cooler one than yours.

April 6, 2017 6:08 PM

World's Coolest Passports.
posted by storybored (39 comments total)

Before reading $100 says Norway is one. That passport is minimalist awesome.

Switzerland should be on every one of these lists forever.

I love Passports. Did you know the Sovereign Military Order of Malta has their own passports? They only issue three.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:16 PM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Lichtenstein, pop 37k; San Marino, pop. 33k; Monaco, pop. 38k; and Andorra, pop. 85k have their own lil' passports as well.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:27 PM on April 6, 2017

Easily my favorite part about the job I had working for an immigration lawyer was getting to see all the different passports. One of our clients was Brazilian, with an Iraqi wife, and he had filled up three whole passports with all the years he spent traveling to visit her and getting stamps from all over the world before they moved to the US. The passports even smelled exotic, like walking into a shop that only sells bulk spices.
posted by phunniemee at 6:55 PM on April 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

I personally enjoy the use of the phrase "Her Britannic Majesty". The British passport design before the one featured in the article had landscapes which were amusingly all captioned (things like "sea cliff", not a particular location), just in case you wanted to know what they were supposed to be. I want to say the one before that had some pattern that didn't depict anything in particular.

German passports used to look like little books with proper bindings. I think they look more or less like most other passports now.
posted by hoyland at 6:59 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

The UK passport was given an overhaul last year, with nifty designs featuring the likes of John Constable, Shakespeare, Charles Babbage and Antony Gormley.

[sigh] Um, any women?

Oh. Two. Great.
posted by desuetude at 7:06 PM on April 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

I just sent my passport off to be renewed. I am disappointed I can't trade it in for one of these.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:35 PM on April 6, 2017

phunniemee: you'd love my passports then, I racked up about 4-5 Bangladeshi ones from birth to 2011 (when I got a Malaysian passport) from all the travel I've done since I was baby. I don't know if they smell particularly exotic, but they are pretty colourful inside.

(Which is probably why passports like ours aren't that interesting visually. What's the point of having UV surprises if the page's just gonna be covered up with stickers anyhoo?)
posted by divabat at 7:45 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Shortly after I got my new Canadian passport, news about the blacklight thing came out. And shortly after that, I was having a dinner party. A dinner party in which I repeatedly took a guest and my blacklight flashlight into the bathroom together. It's the only room in my place that really gets dark, you know?
posted by jacquilynne at 7:58 PM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

Tonga has a banana shaped one!

Did anyone get the super awesome special Benjamin Franklin commemorative (US) passport issued for a few months in 1994 that came with the green cover that got you pulled out of the line at every single fucking border control for the next ten years? Because that one was awesome.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:57 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Still holding out for a Laundry warrant card.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:59 PM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

My regional sympathies in Papers, Please is based on who has the cooler looking passport
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:59 PM on April 6, 2017

I wonder why in this age we can't have passports with both standard format/anti-counterfeiting and our own customization.

Related:

Earlier versions of the passports required that their bearer describe personal features such as height, forehead, and nose (most people listed “average”; a few listed “Roman”). In one case, a man described his face as “intelligent,” only to discover that officials had replaced the adjective with “oval.”

Passports Were Once Considered Offensive—Perhaps They Still Are (SLAtlasObscura)
posted by runcifex at 9:02 PM on April 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

Wait - what's that rectangle with a line and circle in it on the Norwegian passport cover? My Australian passport has the same thing, and I thought it was the Aboriginal flag. Is it some sort of generic passport marker?
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:08 PM on April 6, 2017

Looks like that's the symbol for a biometric passport.
posted by ckape at 9:14 PM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was really disappointed at the turn for the Colbert Report that the US passport book took in the Bush years. My first passport book from the mid 1980's has a quiet dignity about it, and actually feels like an international travel document. The patriotic quotes and engravings post-2006 were an endless source of comedy for the immigration office, every time they handled it. Unfortunately, there's no turning back from that design in a 24 hour news cycle.

The US passport card (which all Americans who travel should get), on the other hand, was born into sin, and is so heavily decorated to the point of unreadability. The State Department really needs to take a hint from the post-harmonization ID cards here in the EU: Low-contrast backgrounds, less cluttered text fields, and modern security features.
posted by groda at 10:34 PM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

I personally enjoy the use of the phrase "Her Britannic Majesty".

Fun fact: the Queen of England does not have a passport; since British passports formally request that other countries allow the bearer entry on behalf of the Queen, it would be redundant for her.

So perhaps more accurately she is her own passport, which I would argue belongs on this list.
posted by Itaxpica at 10:43 PM on April 6, 2017 [10 favorites]

Oooh, I hope the Queen gets stamped each time she visits a country, then.
posted by ooga_booga at 1:13 AM on April 7, 2017 [11 favorites]

Perhaps she gets entry tattoos.
posted by ardgedee at 1:54 AM on April 7, 2017 [6 favorites]

Sadly my petition to replace the UK passport with a hot pink version has so far not been successful.
We're probably destined now to go back to blue to avoid international humiliation.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:00 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Norwegian ones could have been designed by Field Notes!
I personally find the current US passport ridiculously gauche with all its larded americana (Eagles! Presidents! Monuments!)
posted by chavenet at 4:03 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Fun fact: the Queen of England does not have a passport; since British passports formally request that other countries allow the bearer entry on behalf of the Queen, it would be redundant for her.
Neither does Her Majesty have a drivers licence for the same reason.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 5:00 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I laughed for a long time at this Tweet:

@nzdodo: The US passport is like a beautifully drawn graphic novel where all every character says is "Visas." (Even the bear who has the last word.)
posted by Rock Steady at 5:19 AM on April 7, 2017 [9 favorites]

I actually quite like the recent redesign of the US passport. The inside back cover makes me feel proud.
posted by rlk at 6:41 AM on April 7, 2017

Neither does Her Majesty have a drivers licence for the same reason.

Is she theoretically allowed to drive? I'm guessing that, as the monrch is theoretically allowed to do lot of things, up to and including detonating nuclear bombs for any reason, the answer would be yes.
posted by acb at 7:14 AM on April 7, 2017

She doesn't normally drive around London, but there are plenty of pictures of her driving on her estates. She was a driver in the war and it is something she reportedly really enjoys.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:30 AM on April 7, 2017

She doesn't normally drive around London, but there are plenty of pictures of her driving on her estates.

Is there any evidence of her driving anywhere where a driver's licence is ordinarily required?
posted by acb at 8:04 AM on April 7, 2017

Quite a few of her driving around Windsor Great Park, which is not quite precisely one of her estates, so maybe? It's a Crown possession, open to the public, and unlike Balmoral where she also drives a lot, not part of her private landholdings. The same thing that makes her not require a driver's licence makes it somewhat difficult to determine whether or not she would otherwise need one when driving at Windsor. She does have particular privileges to drive on the Long Walk, where no one else (except Park Rangers) ever does.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:36 AM on April 7, 2017

You are not allowed to talk about the Queen driving without mentioning the time she terrified then-Crown Prince Abdullah.
posted by ckape at 10:41 AM on April 7, 2017

Oooh, I hope the Queen gets stamped each time she visits a country, then.

"They don't stamp the animals 'Property of the Zoo'! You can't stamp a huge lion 'Property of the Zoo'!"

"They do it when they're small."
posted by briank at 10:44 AM on April 7, 2017

Brexit passport design competition shortlist revealed.
posted by effbot at 11:49 AM on April 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I knew the Norwegian passport which shows the northern lights under UV light would be there!
posted by Termite at 12:47 PM on April 7, 2017

I have to confess I didn't know about the UV easter egg in the Canadian passport. So now my question is where do I get a source of UV light?!
posted by storybored at 11:00 PM on April 7, 2017

I got a UV flashlight with a pet stain removal package since biological material tends to fluoresce, but you can also just buy them as a stand alone item at Canadian Tire.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:33 PM on April 7, 2017

More or less fancy UV print is a standard security feature these days, and has been used for decades, so not sure it qualifies as an easter egg when everyone does it :-)

(I'm a big fan of the interior design of the Swedish passports, with their stylised representations of swedish cities through landmark buildings, and occasionally very subtle use of UV print to make things look more like a night scene -- e.g. carlights light up, etc. But UV-wise, the earlier design where each page just had a hidden crayfish & dill sprig was ok too, of course :-)
posted by effbot at 3:10 AM on April 8, 2017

> Neither does Her Majesty have a drivers licence for the same reason.

I've heard this before and it doesn't make sense to me. Surely it's not the license itself that grants permission to drive. The license is documentation that you have permission to drive. Or is the idea that the queen wouldn't be subject to the motor vehicle laws that require a license?
posted by Horselover Fat at 6:55 AM on April 9, 2017

Or is the idea that the queen wouldn't be subject to the motor vehicle laws that require a license?

That's probably a reasonable assumption, given that the monarch is (theoretically) not subject to a lot of laws controlling their subjects.

As post-Brexit Britain finds itself with few natural resources and scrabbles around for streams of revenue, it may soon find itself commodifying and parcelling out these ancient privileges to any high-net-worth oligarchs willing to spend money here; perhaps it'll adopt the post-Soviet migalka system, only updated to a digital transponder that exempts the bearer from various laws.
posted by acb at 8:02 AM on April 9, 2017

Or is the idea that the queen wouldn't be subject to the motor vehicle laws that require a license?

It's the nature of a monarchy. The Queen *is* the Crown / State. Think of it like the Holy Trinity -- they are one and the same even if they seem to be embodied separately. The Queen / Crown / State Trinity grants or does not grant its subjects the right to drive, specifically on the basis of passing some tests and past driving records. The licence reflects that -- its a piece of plastic that says in essence "The Trinity has reviewed my qualifications to drive and found them sufficient and thus has graced me with the favour of their permission to drive."

But The Queen as a person is part of the Trinity. She can't review her own qualifications and grant herself permission to drive. Even as a corporeal human being, she's part of the Trinity, she's not subject to it as if it was an outside authority. Everyone else is, including those currently in line for the throne, so they should all have driver's permits. Whether they get them by popping round the Basingstoke DMV, or by having an instructor come to them and administer the usual tests, I don't know -- but William did take the actual test.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:36 AM on April 9, 2017

It's the nature of a monarchy.

In Sweden, we named a location near Stockholm "The King's Bend" after king Gustav V ended up in a ditch. Twenty years later they built the world's largest IKEA store on that spot, to commemorate the event.
posted by effbot at 10:30 AM on April 9, 2017

(Oh, Wikipedia says he wasn't actually behind the wheel. I'm disappoint.)
posted by effbot at 10:32 AM on April 9, 2017